Terry
England is not related to Christina (as far as we know), and is admittedly not
anywhere as dangerously insane. Change the contrast class to normally bright
people, however, and Terry England is still quite staggeringly lunatic. England
is a state representative in Georgia, and most famous on a national level for
defending a bill that would outlaw all abortions after 20 weeks … of fetuses already dead or so
congenitally deformed that it had no hope of living after birth. Well, we can
have a debate about whether abortion is the taking of a life or deprivation of
a future or whatever, but what could possibly have been the rationale behind
England’s bill? Going through labor and giving birth to a corpse is a life experience for the woman, according
to England. Right. England has worked on a farm,
and cows and pigs don’t get the benefit of a medical procedure to remove dead
calves and piglets; they just have to buck up and deliver it. So it follows
that human breeder sows have to do the same, doesn’t it? Also, some guy he met
was willing to give up all the chickens he used for chicken fights (!) if only
abortions were banned, and England found that really moving.

And if
you’re thinking that “well, one foolish comment should not suffice to qualify
as a loon,” rest assured. England is also a hardcore climate change denialist.
“[W]hen I see sound science that points to climate change and global
warming as something that man is causing and that is not something happening
naturally, then I will consider [enacting environmental regulations aimed at
reducing the effects of climate change].” Of course, given England’s
unwillingness to look and ability to evaluate evidence, you can rest assured
that this will never happen.

Diagnosis: Oh, relatively stock example of a
village idiot elected state legislator, and Georgia has an impressive clown
car’s worth of them

Saturday, January 30, 2016

There are (at least) three strategies available to the
science denialist. First, you can try to pretend that science supports your
position by cherry-picking the scientific literature or quote-mining;
second, you can try to argue that the science “isn’t settled yet”,
usually by finding a crazy loner with questionably relevant credentials who
disagree with the overwhelming consensus; or – the most common one – you can
fall back on conspiracies: Scientists know or suspect the truth, but are either
too afraid of their reputations to investigate radical alternatives (since
nothing will bar you from fame and recognition or a Nobel prize more
effectively than discovering something new)
or simply paid to hide it from the general public.

William Engdahl is not afraid to appeal to conspiracies when
science doesn’t yield the results he wants, and has made a bit of a career out
of it as a freelance journalist and an “independent” historian, researcher and
author of books like Myths, Lies and Oil
Wars and Full Spectrum Dominance:
Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. Engdahl is a long-time
associate of the LaRouche movement and has, in fact, written many articles for their publications.

Many of his writings concern oil and international politics
and economics relating to oil. To assess the value of his output, one should
probably notice that Engdahl is a “peak oil denialist”. In fact, Engdahl is a
proponent of abiotic oil,
the idea that petroleum is not biological in origin and hence that peak oil is
a politically motivated conspiracy to … well, you know, some vague gestures
about controlling people. Conveniently enough, Engdahl is also a global warming denialist;
according to Engdahl, global warming, like peak oil, is merely a “scare” and a
“thinly veiled attempt to misuse climate to argue for a new Malthusian
reduction of living standards for the majority of the world while a tiny elite
gains more power.” GMOs,
on the other hand, are dangerous,
and the fact that science is in pretty much agreement to the contrary can
easily be explained away by appeals to corporation-driven conspiracies (he
doesn’t hesitate to cite the few studies that point in a direction he has
already determined that studies ought to point in – we’re talking experienced
denialism here). He’s even written a book on the topic, Seeds of Destruction. The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation,
which does precisely what you think it does: Start with the conclusion Engdahl
wants to defend in the face of scientific consensus; cherrypick and selectively
quote studies that can conceivably be used to serve his agenda, and dismiss the
rest by appeals to conspiracy theories, where the evidence for a conspiracy
consist precisely of the fact that the vast majority of scientists disagree
with Engdahl (who, again, has no relevant expertise on the issues in question).

In a 2011 interview with Russia Today Engdahl stated that
the 2011 Egyptian Revolution was orchestrated by the Pentagon to facilitate
Barack Obama’s Middle East foreign policy: “The ultimate goal of the US is to
take the resources of Africa and Middle East under military control to block
economic growth in China and Russia, thus taking the whole of Eurasia under
control.” And the Arab Spring was a plan “(...) first announced by George W.
Bush at a G8 meeting in 2003 and it was called ‘The Greater Middle East
Project’.” Don’t let details, evidence and reason get in the way of a good
conspiracy theory, shall we?

Diagnosis: The kind of guy Jerome Corsi and Tom Bethell turn to for information. A total joke, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t
possess some influence over the weak of mind or the seriously misinformed.

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Skimming through the entries in our Encyclopedia, at least
one group of truly American loons seems to be strikingly underrepresented: the bigfooters.
Oh, yes, we’ve covered Mark Russell Bell,
who is pushing an updated version of the Bible that also includes information
on bigfoot and UFOs, and the good Arthur David Horn had some ventures into that territory before he discovered Zechariah Sitchin and David Icke.
But when it comes to real, serious
bigfoot researchers, we haven’t got much.

Give a warm welcome, therefore, to Rick Emmer. Emmer is the
author of Bigfoot: Fact or Fiction,
and apparently hasn’t quite mastered the distinction suggested in his title. As
with a lot of Bigfoot hunters, Emmer claims that bigfoot was first discovered by Leif Eiriksson during his discovery of
Newfoundland – there is no textual evidence for such claims, of course, but
that doesn’t prevent Emmer from quoting … something (almost certainly Peter
Byrne, another bigfoot crackpot and the author of The Search for Big Foot:
Monster, Myth or Man? since Emmer, like Byrne, claims that Eiriksson called
the native population “skellrings”, when they would have used “skrælings” or
“skrellings”, a typo that would have been obvious if Emmer had gone to a
primary source or translation done by a real historian instead of crackpot
rantings by a fellow lunatic). The real sagas contain no trace of any encounter
that can be interpreted as even remotely “bigfooty”, but why go to the primary
sources when mining your own deranged imagination is so much more fun? The rest
of the scholarship of the book is of comparable quality.

As a matter of fact, Emmer might not quite fit the bill as a
bigfoot fanatic. It turns out that he has actually written a whole series of
cryptozoology books with the title “X: Fact or Fiction”, where “X” is “kraken”,
“megalodon”, “giant anaconda” and – but of course – “the Loch Ness monster” If he had applied a minimum of rigorous scholarship and intellectual honesty,
these would all have been very short books consisting mostly of the word “no”
(without bothering to double check I assume that the megalodon in question is
supposed to be a currently existing
megalodon, an idea famous from several Discovery Channel docufrauds).

Diagnosis: Oh, well. We suspect that Emmer isn’t much of a
loon when push comes to show. But his fans clearly are, and if you weigh
Emmer’s contributions to humanity he’ll be found sorely wanting.

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Well, Dan Ely is, in fact, a Professor of Biology at the
University of Akron, and has, indeed, published some research. He “has no
formal training in evolutionary biology outside what he may have received in an
introductory biology course”, of course (though he certainly doesn’t point that
out voluntarily), and received his formal training in a medical school
environment. But yes, he’s got a title suggesting expertise in biology. He’s
also a creationist. He belongs, in other words, to a group of rare specimens
the anti-science brigade values very highly and knows to use that for what it’s
worth.

Thus, Ely ended up testifying during the Kansas evolution hearings,
for instance, where he displayed a rather fundamental lack of understanding of
evolution, as well as some troubles with honesty (and tried to avoid answering questions about the age of the Earth).
His colleagues at Akron, some of whom do, indeed, have a background in
evolution, even published a letter decrying Ely’s “profound misconceptions” and misrepresentations in that context (emphasizing that “Dr. Ely is a
physiologist whose religious beliefs have caused him to seek out non-existent
‘discrepancies’ in evolution to prove his preconceived notion that common
ancestry must be false”) and decrying his portrayal of his interactions with
the members of the department at Akron who actually do evolutionary research:
Ely claimed that:

“I go to our molecular
biologists that are following molecular phylogenies and I say, is there any
discrepancy here? This is your area, it's not my area specifically, are there
discrepancies? Are there controversies? Absolutely. And so they would go on to
explain to me either from plants or from animals the different discrepancies
that there are […] And as I went to
further experts in our department that were geneticists and individuals in
molecular phylogeny like this, I said, is there something that we're missing in
evolutionary theory? I don't belong to any special groups. I've come to these
conclusions on my own. And they said absolutely, absolutely there’s
discrepancies. There's discussions all the time.”

Of course, the “discrepancies” are debates over details in
the history of species, but Ely doesn’t present them as such. It’s a pretty familiar gambit among anti-science campaigners.

Diagnosis: Honesty is not the first quality that springs to mind when describing the situation, and it is easy to wonder to what extent Ely is a very virtuous person. It's not the first time we've seen religious fundamentalism in tension with the virtues the religion officially promotes.

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Ken Ham is to many the ultimate symbol of religiously driven ignorance, anti-science
fundamentalist crazy, but there are those who are crazier than Ken Ham – we’ve encountereda couple – although they fortunately don’t have Ham’s organization or influence. In fact, there are
those who are so much crazier than Ken Ham that they attack Answers in Genesis from the right. Pastor Don Elmore of Union Kentucky, for instance, although he
praises AiG’s tireless battles against reason and science, thinks they’re part of a humanistic conspiracy:

I am aware of the
forces supporting “Answers in Genesis”, these being the same powers that are
supporting similar multi-cultural anti-Christian organizations such as Alpha,
Promise Keepers, The Full Gospel Businessmen’s Association, Billy Graham
ministries, producers of many modern Bible versions, and a multitude of other
ministries. These forces are the anti-Christian powers seeking One World
Government under man, not God. The essence of my criticism is to show that
“Answers in Genesis” supports the humanistic and unbiblical “Brotherhood of Man”
doctrine (which also is a Hindu/Roman Catholic/Masonic/Jewish/Judeo-Christian
and World-Church belief).

For instance, less
than 60 years ago, mixed racial unions were illegal in most of the states in
the United States and other White nations. But now, they are tolerated as being
supposedly within God’s plan. Under the influence and promotion of the
Jewish-Masonic-Papal-Communist/Socialist controlled governments and media,
Western Christianity has succumbed to the approval of race mixing, and we will
be looking at what is behind this. The Bible abounds with evidence of God’s
clear will that the races be separate in every way. “Answers in Genesis” mould
all its answers around Judeo-Christian doctrines and traditions, and claims a
different basis and definition of “race” from that which the Bible gives.
Furthermore, there is evidence of Jewish Talmudic sources, or of what the
Apostle Paul calls “Jewish fables”.

Whee. You can read the whole screed here,
but you will never get those sanity points back. It should come as little
surprise that Elmore is an associate of Mark Downey.